Jesmimi

A big congrats to Jesmimi!  If you don't already know why, go to her blog and see for yourself.

The First Step
⎯C. P. Cavafy
(trans. Evangelos Sachperoglou)

The young poet Eumenes complained
to Theocritus one day:
“Two years have passed since I began to write,
and all I’ve composed is just one idyll.
It is my only completed work.
Alas, it’s high, so I see,
the stairway of Poetry is so very high;
and from the first step, where I stand,
miserable me, I’ll never climb higher.”
Theocritus said: “These words
are blasphemous and unbecoming.
Even though you stand on the first step,
you still ought to be proud and happy.
To have come so far is no small matter;
to have done so much is great glory.
For even this first step is still
by far above the common people.
In order to set foot upon this step,
you must be in your own right
a citizen in the city of ideas.
It is both difficult and rare
to be made a citizen of that city.
In its agora you come across Lawgivers
that cannot be deceived by any opportunist.
To have come so far is no small matter;
to have done so much is great glory.”

Cannery Row

I read this book many months ago. I loved this book. I loved the way it meandered around in it's setting, got lost in anecdotes on characters, anecdotes that went off on tangents, before the story eventually settled on something resembling a plot, dropped it for a while and picked it back up in the end. That plot? Mack and the boys throwing a party for Doc, such a nice guy.



Are stories allowed to do that anymore? Some novels, maybe, but what about short stories? Stewart Dybek comes close in his collection I Sailed with Magellen. Look at "Blue Boy". It's the kind of fiction that punches out a large space for itself, a space larger than needed for the plot that drops in. Or he makes it seem that way. The story is roomy, yet every word counts. I guess the opposite of this, the more commonly accepted story, is one we describe as "tight". Granted, a novel has more room to be loose than a story does, but couldn't there be more loose stories? And what makes them loose? Their focus on setting? Is it that no one cares to read them that much, journals have no room for them, or editors have no patience for them? Or all three? Or any combination of the above?

I suppose the purpose of this post is to ask whether any of you robots could suggest stories similar to those described above, or authors who write such stories. Much appreciated.

From Baxter

I know all of you who took Nancy's workshop still have Charles Baxter's Burning Down the House. I dusted off my copy to revisit a few of his gems. Here's one of 'em from On Defamiliarization that addresses emotion in fiction:

"The fallacy of much fiction is that in any particular moment we are feeling one emotion, when in fact we are feeling many emotions at once, many of them contradictory, such as lust and gloom. But of course lust and gloom often go together, as do depression and cheerfulness. What is a bored ecstasy like? What does one feel in the midst of pessemistic hope? Is there such a thing as furious tenderness? Why are so many psychopaths lovable? The monsters we have all known in our lives are monsters almost by definition because they are often not monsters, and we expect them to be one way, and they turn out to be another. That's why we admitted them into our lives in the first place.

"Psychopaths, afterall, are great charmers. Bad people are good people who have gone on a sort of lifelong spiritual vacation, and who remember to be decent from time to time.

"....Instead of making our narrative events and our characters more colorful, we might make them thicker, more undecidable, more contradictory and unrecognizable."

Congratulations for Peter

I'm doing my part to revive this damn thing because I miss all of you folks, and I wish we conversed more. I read over at the blog-that-shall-not-be-named (because several of us lurk there) that Peter Ho Davies is on the long list for the Booker Prize. Congratulations to Peter!

And here are pieces of a poem (I know that's probably sacrilege to cut a poem into pieces and post it, but I can't help it) by Michael Ondaatje called Burning Hills that I'm posting in the hope it will jump-start this place.

So he came to write again
in the burnt hill region
north of Kingston. A cabin
with mildew spreading down the walls.
Bullfrogs on either side of him.

...

What he brought: a typewriter
tins of ginger ale, cigarettes. A copy of Strangelove
of The Intervals, a postcard of Rousseau's The Dream.
His friends' words were strict as lightning
unclothing the bark of a tree, a shaved hook.
The postcard was a test pattern by the window
through which he saw growing scenery.

...

There is one picture that fuses the five summers.
Eight of them are leaning against a wall
arms around each other
looking into the camera and the sun
trying to smile at the unseen adult photographer
trying against the glare to look 21 and confident.
The summer and friendship will last forever.
Except one who was eating an apple. That was him
oblivious to the significance of the moment.
Now he hungers to have that arm around the next shoulder.
The wretched apple is fresh and white.

Since he began burning hills
the Shell strip has taken effect.
A wasp is crawling on the floor
tumbling over, its motor fanatic.
He has smoked five cigarettes.
He has written slowly and carefully
with great love and great coldness.
When he finishes he will go back
hunting for the lies that are obvious.

The older of the two Karens told me that when I moved from Ann Arbor, I would miss that community of writers, my friends, that I had become a part of. And she was right. I do. So post, damnit!

SPRING

The loveliest
thing:

a man
moves slowly
through the crush

holding a full
trimmed sheet cake
above his head.

--Susan Hutton

What It Looks Like Here

I was just rereading the brilliant and heartfelt conversation you robots (hello! dear robots! I miss you!) were having awhile back about sentimentality and emotion in fiction. I'm on hold with the insurance company that's taken 6 weeks to decide if I'm eligible, meanwhile I'm paying an arm and half a leg and a few toes for medication I need, dear god do I need it. Anyways, the insurance company is not the point, though in a way it is relevant in the way that it represents the soulless writing that is out there without a soul and lacking souls and stuff. I can't bear to read that stuff--who can?--and do anything to avoid it to the point of wanting to read the saddest possible words with saddest possible music on the record player (Songs: Ohia, anyone?)... just to feel something, already. Lately I've been working on putting together a poetry manuscript for my dear friend who died 2 years ago and came across a spontaneous journal-like passage about not wanting to write sad poems, not wanting to write about death. (Yes, it's striking that she would say such a thing considering what happened--all her poems are like this, eerie and sad and prescient.) It reminded me of a moment in the prison workshop a couple summers ago when one of the inmates asked me why my poems are so dark. I didn't know what to say, though I did know that my poems are often kind of dark, if not expressly so, then suggestively. I'm not such a sad person--I like to think of myself as relatively positive, considering the state of the world--but my default emotion in my poems seems to be sadness, or some sort of grief, something darkly dark. What I'm wondering is--why is this my default emotion? I'm not looking for psychoanalysis, though lord knows it might be helpful. I guess I'm just curious as to whether or not sadness is the easiest thing to approximate in poems and/or fiction, and if it's the easiest thing to respond to, or the easiest emotion we recognize in ourselves and therefore in the writing we read. I too want to weep, sob even, at the end or beginning or anytime in a novel and though it happens less in poems, I think, I gravitate toward the poems that leave me feeling a little hollow or sad... What's interesting here, of course, is that there are many kinds of sadness and sometimes the tears at the end of something are more about the beauty or the happiness or just the depression of having to pick out a new book. Housekeeping is perhaps the most memorable book to have had this effect on me--I was paralyzed for days by it and couldn't put my finger on what was so crushing about it. And perhaps, or of course, that was why it was so moving. BUT there was sadness there... And I'm more often than not crushed or moved by the expression or imagining of that emotion in anything I read than anything else. I'm also interested in what my friend Greta said: She didn't want to write about death. But she did, and so have I and I'm willing to bet we all have, even it's just been in failed attempts that seem sentimental or unreal. And some of us (I include myself among you) feel a little morbid in this sense, fascinated with literal and physical death and the grief that accompanies it. I don't necessarily want to write about death, either, but maybe I could forgo this and be more comfortable with it if I understood my compulsion to do so...